Debian Is Still Being Made To Build With LLVM/Clang

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Debian Is Still Being Made To Build With LLVM/Clang

Debian developers are still working on making the operating system compiler agnostic so that its packages can be built with LLVM/Clang and other compilers rather than continuing in a monogamist relationship with GCC...

http://www.phoronix.com/vr.php?view=MTI5ODc

[DeepDayze]

In an ideal world code should be compilable with any C/C++ compiler with the resulting binary code behaving in an identical way. Seems that the kernel has to be written just to compile with GCC, as GCC has its quirks and the developers have to end up writing code to workaround bugs and quirks. Fixing GCC should be the best thing rather than having application and OS developers having to code for the compiler. Any miscompilations should be investigated and corrected which then can improve the quality of the compiled code.

Its a good thing Debian is doing and hope other distros and developers will consider trying different compilers to see how their code behaves and perhaps fix the code so that any compiler can compile it correctly.

[Rigaldo]

@DeepDayze
Actually, special GCC extensions are used by the (Linux) kernel, which have been requested by the kernel developers.
So a compiler not implementing can't really compile it. It's not GCC bugs ....
I think there is work on implementing them on Clang though, as well as work to make the kernel compilable by the other compilers by a different team.
Making the code more cross-platform/compiler would probably indeed increase quality though.

[DeepDayze]

@DeepDayze
Actually, special GCC extensions are used by the (Linux) kernel, which have been requested by the kernel developers.
So a compiler not implementing can't really compile it. It's not GCC bugs ....
I think there is work on implementing them on Clang though, as well as work to make the kernel compilable by the other compilers by a different team.
Making the code more cross-platform/compiler would probably indeed increase quality though.

That's what I meant..code should be able to be compiled with any compiler out there not just gcc

[MartinN]

... you two timing whore, you....

[WorBlux]

In an ideal world code should be compilable with any C/C++ compiler with the resulting binary code behaving in an identical way. Seems that the kernel has to be written just to compile with GCC, as GCC has its quirks and the developers have to end up writing code to workaround bugs and quirks. Fixing GCC should be the best thing rather than having application and OS developers having to code for the compiler. Any miscompilations should be investigated and corrected which then can improve the quality of the compiled code.

Its a good thing Debian is doing and hope other distros and developers will consider trying different compilers to see how their code behaves and perhaps fix the code so that any compiler can compile it correctly.

I agree, multiple compilers should help reveal subtle bugs and poor/fragile code. And also good for improving the compilers and keeping them in competition.

[DeepDayze]

I agree, multiple compilers should help reveal subtle bugs and poor/fragile code. And also good for improving the compilers and keeping them in competition.

Yes, and subtle bugs introduced into the compiled binaries by a particular compiler can certainly be hard to track down and putting the code through multiple compilers can help track down any bugs caused by compilers